Life In All It's Glory

I wrote this poem on behalf of my mamu (my mom's brother for you non-Urdu folks:)) in December 2010, for a friend of his who'd been diagnosed with brain cancer a while back. He'd been my mamu's roommate during his graduate years in Purdue University and from the stories I got to hear about him, he must have been a force to be reckoned with. Bursting with life, exceptionally bright; he'd bagged the best of both worlds. He was in love with football and all things sporty, and he was also a brilliant student. He got married, he started a family, but it seems to me that life's got a taste for melodrama. The next thing you know, the doctors found he had a brain tumour. And it only got worse from there. Cancer is such an ugly disease. I don't understand it, it's always the last thing you expect, you always think you're immune to it but just when you're least expecting it, it rears it's head and strikes. His cancer had spread too far and wide to be contained, and the doctors said it was only a matter of time. Always the same insensitive words. His family wanted to collect as much of his life as they could and preserve it for his child to remember her dad by. So my mamu asked me to write a poem. I guess people think I'm good with words, and I was honoured to be a part of it. It took me quite some time. I didn't want it to sound tacky or cliched. And it had to have a personal touch. This is what I ultimately came up with. 

It's 5pm in San Diego

Been raining hard all this week

I'm driving home, radio on

Norah Jones says she's Thinking About You

I stepped in a puddle

I watched the water ripples form

One stirring the other

Like the lives you've touched on

And in my mind

You will always be twenty-five

Brawling, weight-lifting, learning

The science of the instep drive.

Your sweaty t-shirts, dripping wet

 across our hostel room

The fridge thoroughly empty

And we 'd know you'd stormed through.

You maintained you weren't one for emotions

But we knew that was only pretend

What else does saving squirrels and

Lengthy phone calls to your fiancée portend?

We all wish time flowed backwards

Back to those good old Purdue days

Back to coffee-swigging, all night movie dissection

And jumping on mattresses.

But I guess we're all just ripples

In this big puddle of life

Always spiraling outwards

So you know its gonna be all right.

And just like that

I know our friendship will last

It will last through the night.

My mamu's friend passed away a couple months after that.  I guess I was hoping for a miracle to happen, and that my mamu would call me one day and delightedly exclaim that his friend was doing fine now. But it wasn't to be. Sure, miracles happen, but not always.